Conviction of Bridgewater man who killed his mother, then lived with her body for 15 days, is upheld

Friday

Sep 26, 2008 at 12:01 AMSep 26, 2008 at 11:49 AM

The state supreme court has upheld the conviction of George J. Nardi, who claimed he loved his mother and kept her body in the apartment they shared because he wanted to spend the Christmas holidays with her.

Maureen Boyle

The state Supreme Judicial Court upheld the 2006 conviction of the man who killed his mother and then kept living in the Bridgewater apartment with the corpse for 15 days.

The SJC Thursday refused to overturn the conviction of George J. Nardi, who claimed he loved his mother and kept her body in the apartment they shared because he wanted to spend the Christmas holidays with her.

Nardi was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence without parole.

He claimed he found his mother dead in the apartment and didn’t kill her.

An autopsy found she was suffocated, a finding he questioned in his appeal.

“We conclude that the evidence supported Nardi’s conviction of murder in the first degree, by reason of deliberate premeditation, and that there is no basis on which to reduce that verdict or order a new trial,” the court wrote in its decision.

At his trial, Nardi testified he plunged into depression after he found his 59-year-old mother dead in the Bridgewater apartment they shared, leaving him in a suicidal fog with little memory of the days that followed.

His mother, Dianne L. Barchard, was found dead by authorities on Dec. 31, 2002. She was killed Dec. 15, 2002.

Prosecutors alleged Nardi killed his mother in a fit of anger after learning she wanted him to move out, then dragged her body into a bedroom, opening the window to clear the air as the body decomposed.

Nardi, at one point, had said he kept her body because he wanted to spend another Christmas with her, prosecutors alleged.

Police at the time found evidence in the apartment that someone tried to clean up blood and an autopsy found Barchard suffered an injury to the nose.